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I think unless someone (TPF?) hires a professional research firm, any "survey" about this is going to have limited value. To get at not just *what* the perceptions are but *why*, I think you'll need a properly designed survey and true random sampling of IT professionals.

I have some experience of designing and administering questionnaires and analysing questionnaire data, both from my academic studies and in my current and previous jobs, and this is why I agree with dagolden that we need to enlist the services of a PR firm specialising in reputation analysis. I seem to recall seeing a talk at a London.pm workshop/tech meeting about how a company[1] was using Perl/NLP techniques to do just that for major corporate brands, but purely on a statistical level like brandwatch.net

While I agree with the need to change the perception of people from the outside I doubt
you can actually find out why do they have that perception. As the saying goes perception is reality so how do you ask people why do they think reality is what it is?

I don't think companies invest in finding out why is their perception bad. They invest in changing it.

I think Perl needs someone with a marketing hat. Someone who has this as a paid job. One of the first things she should do is to find out what is really

The root problem is that geeks don't do marketing well, don't respect marketing, even when marketing is the most important thing we can do for ourselves and our projects. (It's been a while since I listened to his talk, so my memory is fuzzy here.)

One of the interesting points he made is that GTE (the phone company) had a very bad reputation among its customers and in its service area. They conducted a poll to see what it would take to improve

I find this really interesting. If Perl's PR is so bad that we can't pull out of it, then I guess always referring to Perl 6 as Rakudo (assuming that's the implementation you use) could be a great thing.

That being said, I'm not a defeatist and I don't believe Perl's PR problems are insurmountable. The Perl community's resistance to PR, however, might be, thus making this a moot point.

However, I think we can both agree that marketing activities should reflect reality. That's why I base my conclusions on (and refer to) publicly accessible raw data, such as timelines, release dates, bug reports, patch submissions, commit logs, documentation, and mailing lists are all public information. Anyone who wants to review that data in its orig

You systematically misrepresent the problems that the Perl 5 development has, and invent new ones. You propose technical solutions that show a total lack of understanding of what is a large user base for Perl 5. You refuse to listen to people who actually work on Perl 5. You arrogantly think that if most people on P5P think you're wrong, that's because most of P5P is wrong. Perl needs PR, but _your_ kind of PR is certainly hurting Perl a lot.

As Dave Mitchell said on P5P [mpe.mpg.de], a list of hasty notes taken during a discussion among a non-representative group of mostly irregular porters was bound to ignore the most important problems. Yet I effectively recognize many concerns which I already mentioned (see for example the end of http://consttype.blogspot.com/2009/07/job-of-pumpking.html [blogspot.com] ) and I largely agree with the general line of thought. Which has little in common with yours, as explained on modernperlbooks. The BOF discussed about release managemen

The BOF discussed about release management and volunteer herding; they didn't propose to break backwards compatibility,

That's only technically true:

Chip: Once we've defined a deprecation cycle, we define breakage of compatibility.

Don't misquote me: I didn't called you a marketer.

You're right. I apologize. You have called me a marketdroid [blogspot.com]; I suppose the suffix is of vital importance. The same post implies I'm a propagandist, that I'm anti-p5p, and called me hysterical and deaf to criticism. You've a [blogspot.com]

I didn't delete anything except from my own initiative (and you know that), and for the rest I plaid guilty: what you're doing on modernperlbooks is disinformation and FUD. I note that it's Chip's turn to be quoted out of context. And now you're speaking about healthy debate, while I resigned in disgust from P5P after months of trying to avoid responding to your attacks. It would have been wiser to ignore you completely. Which I shall do from now on, since you still refuse to understand technical arguments.

I'm finding it interesting doing Ruby fulltime right now. The PR says Ruby is fantastically effective and time saving, etc.

On actually using it and becoming proficient, I'm finding it's less efficient to write. I think I'm concluding that a competent Perl programmer ought to have better, less buggy code with more features than a Ruby programmer. I don't do Rails though.

Right now, it seems to be coming down to things like Perl's better error detection, a built-up toolchain, and CPAN's metadata.